Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Duke Nukem Forever: A Long-Overdue Review

During the Christmas Steam sale, I
decided to pull a prank on KGB. I bought a bunch of copies of Duke
Nukem Forever, as the fact that it was selling for a tenth of its
original retail price struck me as a hilarious indication of its lack
of quality and I thought it a good way to spread around a little
digital coal. After all, we had all read the reviews and had laughed
quite a bit at the spectacle.

How I wish I had left it at
that.

Deciding that it was rather ill-natured of me to
criticize a game I hadn’t even played, one day I decided to boot up
DNF to see for myself what the game was like. I will readily admit I
went into this with preconceived notions of how the game would be,
but I really hoped to be wrong. I hoped that all of the critical
reviews were hyperbole, and that DNF would be like Duke Nukem 3D made
for modern hardware. So, while some can claim bias, know that I
really wanted this game to be good.

While
I wasn’t expecting Battlefield 3 graphics, I was expecting
something quite a bit more polished, given the way DNF was passed off
as a AAA $50 title. To say the graphics are mediocre would be
unwarranted: while the creatures look pretty good, the humans are all
kinds of uncanny valley wrong. Walking animations are bad, especially
anything female in the game; faces have a certain wrongness to them,
especially the child faces; and I’ve seen bad foreign film dubs
with more convincing lip synching. The intro cinematic recap of Duke
3D before the menu is the most stylish and entertaining part of
DNF.

Looks....pixelated....

Duke Nukem 3D was a touchstone for
first person shooters. Lots of weapons, lots of secrets, and lots of
enemies; in addition, many objects were interactive, such as working
lights one could shoot out, water faucets, toilets, and strippers.
DNF attempts to capture this, but by rote imitation rather than
innovation. As many other reviewers have noted, DNF reaches in too
many different directions to excel in any:

There’s a working
pool table!
And you can lift weights!
And you can punch a
punching bag!
And there’s a pinball game!
And if you do
well enough, we’ll add to Duke’s Ego(HP)!

And so on.

While the first time was
cute (and I had more fun than I’m comfortable admitting attempting
to polish the bathroom in the first level with a turd), none of the
mini-games or interactive objects are particularly well designed or
thought out. One cannot even shoot out the lights, which was possible
in DN3D.

How corny

But beyond feeble attempts at
recapturing the charm of its predecessor, DNF rather obviously
‘borrows’ elements from many other points in the evolution of the
FPS genre which arose during its torturous development history. It’s
readily apparent the developers would see a game do well and attempt
to cull elements from that game which the developers thought made the
game successful; such is how Duke went from carrying an entire
arsenal to four weapons – and that’s double the original weapon
capacity. Duke Nukem is not nor ever should be a tactical shooter,
and when coupled with the low ammo pools, having so few weapon slots
contributes to the wild swings in difficulty. Even on easy, it
was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had in games. It’s
readily apparent that DNF would have greatly benefited from more
extensive (or rather, existent) playtesting. Coupled with symptoms
of consolitis (Checkpoints without any quick save?! Really?!) and bad
level design, the game comes off as half-baked, which it is. Oh, and
Duke runs like a 60 year old fat man with a bad hip.

Also, who riverdances?

Are you one of those
people who misses “Mind of Mencia”? Did you think that “Meet
the Spartans” was hilarious, and that references to the idea of
jokes are enough? Have you suffered massive head trauma causing you
to believe the year is currently 2008? Are you one of those people
who sing “America, Fuck Yeah” without any sense of the irony of
the song? Are you a misogynist?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of
these questions, you’re terrible and you would love this terrible
game.

Like “Mind of Mencia”, DNF
‘borrows’ not only gameplay attributes from other games, but
whole jokes and lines wholesale from better sources, particularly the
character “Ash” from the Evil Dead series. While Duke has long
been noted to have been very similar to Ash, lines are now lifted
verbatim without even the paltry effort to jumble the words around.

Like “Meet the Spartans”, most of
the ‘jokes’ in DNF are actually references to memes or movies.
After the third time hearing “Porkchop Sandwiches” after
dispatching a pig cop, I found myself missing silent protagonists.
Additionally, if that example didn’t make it obvious enough, most
of the reference-non-jokes reference material from 2008 or older,
making the effort seem forced and dated.

Additionally, DNF is
jingoistic and misogynist. In more capable hands, this could have
been handled in a way that was clever and tongue in cheek – a
satire of such concepts. This game, however, is nowhere near clever
enough for that. The twins who are more or less associated with Duke
in the start of the game (an aside: the ‘babes’ in this game have
less sex appeal than the two week old corpse of a seventy year old
hooker) are later found by Duke having been impregnated by aliens. Oh
yeah, spoiler alert.

Anyway, the twins protest that they are
too young to be pregnant, and then promise Duke that they’ll get
back to a reasonable weight. At about that point the aliens burst
through them, killing Duke’s…love interests, I guess? (Is there a
better term for that? Fuck-buddies of the week? Incest pals? Help me
out, editor) Duke’s response to this could best be termed as mild
irritation, followed by indifference. From that point forward, it’s
in the player’s best interest to off any such captured woman before
she pops, which releases small enemy mobs at Duke. While a somewhat
similar scenario occurred in DN3D, the way it’s handled in DNF,
with the dialogue from the victims, brings DNF to a new low.

Ahahahaha haha ha
hah.

Duke Nukem Forever was doomed from the
start, and will go down as a case study in how the perfect is the
enemy of the good (also a perfect example of why to avoid putting
references with a brief shelf life in your video game). Had this
game been released back in 2008 it would have been passable, if still
priced too high. Had 3D Realms released a finished game within five
years of having announced it they would not have become the defunct
laughing stock they are now.

But for all its history, for all its faults, one stands above the
others: Duke Nukem Forever commits the cardinal sin of gaming – it
isn’t fun. I wanted this game to be good, to defy expectations, to
even in the slightest way be a good throwback to Duke3d. Instead I
found playing this to be a chore. Bad level design, bad gunplay, bad
game design decisions, and bad writing make this game cringe-worthy.
The king may be back, but he’s in the fat Elvis stage and it
remains to be seen if Gearbox can salvage this character from his
current ignominious state.